Yeah it's certainly not without issue, the network is full of blockages, collapsed ducts etc.
Traffic management and road closures can be hard work, we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside, lockdown was extremely productive for network build like this!)
For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street".
In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt nets"). London for example is now well served for broadband by Community Fibre, g.network, Hyperoptic and others alongside the incumbents.
Both are valid addresses and can be assigned to hosts.
Network address is only really used for directly attached networks, non directly attached networks will route to any address in the block correctly.
Same for broadcast address, they're also relative to whatever block you're talking about at the time, so whilst 3.255.255.255 is the broadcast for 3.0.0.0/8 subnet it's just another "usable" address in the 3.0.0.0/5 subnet and when you send a packet then you, and probably your router, don't know what subnets in use on the other side :) (unless it's directly attached)
Too many customer devices don't support /31 subnets unfortunately, for example with Draytek we've seen an issue where it would accept the 255.255.255.254 subnet but we'd see a whole raft of connection issues making the connection unusable.
If we provide a dedicated IP for a connection where we provide the LAN we just put a single /32 on the loopback and NAT onto this which is obviously much more economic with addresses.
We're an ISP, most of our customers are businesses. Of those, around 50% opt for a pre-configured LAN (i.e. we do NAT and usually CGNAT too).
For the rest we provide a static IP address, so we'll allocate a /30 (block of 4), and they get a single usable address which they will assign to their own manged router/firewall.
For the majority of our customers "networking" is either handled as overflow for their in/out IT resource or often by someone remotely savvy with tech.
For most of these people networking ranges from an infrequent concern to a vague mystery that can be sorted with a bit of googling.
For most, deploying and testing IPv6 has absolutely no upside and quite a bit of potential downside, that's because "everything works" on IPv4 and configuring IPv6 is just another potential source of error.
In addition, most people who opt for this setup do so in order to expose some internal service to the internet (port forward), again there is usually zero incentive to also deploy IPv6 as they can't be sure their client device will be using v6 when they come to connect, but they know it will support v4, everything does.
And so herin lies the issue, it's chicken and egg, they know they need v4, not every server they access or client who accesses their forwards supports v6, so they _have_ to implement v4. As such they see no reason to "faff" about with IPv6, and I don't really blame them.
We're considering charging more for dedicated v4 and possibly offering a free translation service (another point of failure :() but honestly, most would just pay the extra and then just resent us a little more. Our competitors continue to acquire v4 space as we do, this is what our customers want.
Until there is v6 only content (but who is incentivised to do this?) then I can't see any incentive for these users.
Homo Deus (the sequel as mentioned) answers the question of why he has formed his particular view of the future.
In essence, yes economic incentive is the basis for much of today's human corporation, but with growing AI/robotics, the same economic incentive will make much current human input unnecessary.
Then, for example, would counties see so many humans as a big cost? How do they solve that if they no longer need them to work?
We were already using traefik as a proxy for our docker/swarm clusters and this is a single container drop in to add authentication to every traefik request.
It's still missing a few key features but it can get you started, we're testing the use of a single auth domain (so you don't have to add every internal service domain as a refirect_uri in Google - looks similar to how sso works) internally and we expect to release this shortly once finished.
Additionally, if you want an even lighter weight option, we also use, with great success, cloudflare's lua script on a few services we don't run with docker/traefik: https://github.com/cloudflare/nginx-google-oauth
I think it's safe to say you're underestimating Disney, they don't just knock out a kids film every year or so - they invest heavily in R&D and are pioneering many tech fields, animation, haptic feedback etc.
Found myself in the exact same situation (have a WileyFox, updated and ended up with the awful true caller app as the default dialler + found I couldn't use the default google dialler), I've since been using: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.contapps.a... but it does have adverts, I'd welcome any other suggestions (aside from re-flash).
Only today I was joking about how absurd it is that I was struggling with such a fundamental feature.
Chris, after starting an ISP[1] in the UK in 2014 I certainly feel you're pain around the difficulties in starting an ISP! Myself and my co-founders have often looked at the comparable easy of growth software based startups and wondered what on earth we were doing, but we soldier on and our looking at our reliable, contracted MRR now is certainly starting to make up for it :)
Good luck, I look forward to keeping up with how things are going your side of the Atlantic.
I've toyed with different monetisation strategies over the last couple of years, I even conducted a 6 month survey of what people would be willing to pay. In the end I decided I couldn't justify charging for it and a few months ago I rolled out a "pay-what-you-want" model like AdBlockPlus, during the A/B test on 20% of users I generated just over $100 dollars in the first 2 weeks, then basically nothing - so the annual/monthly model is attractive!
I like the idea of keeping it open source, then those who don't want to pay can still use it - think I may follow your model :)
They usually do, but these only protect from grid failures. HEX certainly does have battery + generators (it's one of the most important DC's in the country).
Components inside the DC should be redundant, but the customer can decide whether to have dual power feeds from redundant areas of the DC provided to their rack/cage.
It's a power outage in Telecity Harbour Exchange, from the LINX mailing list this morning:
08:12
- We are currently experiencing an outage impacting some of our equipment located at Telecity/Equinix Harbour Exchange in London. It is impacting both the Juniper and Extreme LANs.
- We are still investigating to get further information, but we have lost all management access to the devices at the moment.
08:45
- We have had confirmation from Telecity/Equinix that there was indeed a partial loss of power impacting one of the power feeds.
- Power failed at 07:55 BST and was restored at 08:17 BST for the majority of our equipment.
- Unfortunately one of our edge routers (edge4-tch) on the Juniper LAN is still down at the moment.
09:33
- Power to edge4-tch has also been restored now. The router has been back up since 9:15 BST.
- All member services should be restored.
- We have an engineer on site and are working with Telecity/Equinix to understand why we lost all power to that device.
- We are also waiting for a full report from Telecity/Equinix about the cause of the power failure.
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We don't peer with BT so ou traffic was OK but we did notice loss of service from AWS to BTNet
Traffic management and road closures can be hard work, we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside, lockdown was extremely productive for network build like this!)